Hackaday Newsletter 0xB5

Hacker Family Holiday Traditions [HACKADAY]() A Brief History of Teleportation [Read Article Now»]( Tis the season By [Elliot Williams]( ’Tis the season for soldering! At least at my house. My son and I made some fairly LED-laden gifts for the immediate relatives last year, and he’s got the blinky bug. We were brainstorming what we could make this year, and his response was “I don’t care, but it needs to have lots of LEDs”. It’s also the season for reverse engineering, apparently, because we’re using a string of WS2812-alike “[fairy lights](”. These are actually really neat, they look good and are relatively cheap. It’s a string of RGB LEDs with drivers, each dipped in epoxy, and run on a common three-enameled-wire bus. Unlike WS2812s, which pass the data on to the next unit in the line and then display them with a latching pulse at the end of a sequence, these LED drivers seem to count how many RGB packets have been sent down the wire, and only respond to their own number. This means that if you cut up a string of 200 LEDs, it behaves like a string of 200 WS2812s. But if you cut say 10 LEDs off the string, where you cut them matters. If you cut it off the front of the string, you only have to send 10 color packets. If you cut them off the other end, you need to send 290 dummy packets before they even start listening. Bizarre, but ’tis the season for bizarre hacks. And finally, ’tis the season for first steps into “software architecture”. Which is to say that my son is appreciating functions for the first time in his life. Controlling one LED is easy, but making a light show is about two more abstraction layers on top of that. We’ve been having fun making them dim, twinkle, and chase so far. We only have two more weekends, though, and we don’t have a final light show figured out yet, but after all, ’tis the season for last minute present hacking. From the Blog --------------------------------------------------------------- [Scratch And Sniff Stickers And The Gas Panic of ’87]( By [Lewin Day]( An educational campaign goes wrong, and the fire department is not amused. [Read more »]( [The London Underground Is Too Hot, But It’s Not An Easy Fix]( By [Lewin Day]( Excess heat is accumulating in the London subway system, and nobody knows how to get it out. [Read more »]( [This Week in Security: National Backdoors, Web3 Backdoors, and Nearest Neighbor WiFi]( By [Jonathan Bennett]( CALEA is being abused by China, and not only the NSA. Who could have predicted that? [Read more »]( [Hackaday Podcast]( [Hackaday Podcast Episode 299: Beaming Consciousness, Understanding Holograms, and Dogfooding IPv6]( By [Hackaday Editors]() What happened last week on Hackaday? The Podcast will get you up to speed. [Read more »]( If You Missed It --------------------------------------------------------------- [A Month Without IPV4 is Like a Month Without…]( [3D Printing Threaded Replacements]( [Sniffing Around Inside a ThinkPad Battery]( [Rolling Your Own Ball Screws]( [Cranking Up the Detail in a Flight Simulator from 1992]( [Non-Planar Fuzzy Skin Textures Improved, Plus a Paint-On Interface]( [Hackaday]() NEVER MISS A HACK [Share]( [Share]( [Share]( [Terms of Use]( [Privacy Policy]( [Hackaday.io]( [Hackaday.com]( This email was sent to {EMAIL} [why did I get this?]( [unsubscribe from this list]( [update preferences]( Hackaday.com · 61 S Fair Oaks Ave Ste 200 · Pasadena, CA 91105-2270 · USA